UCF gunman's online persona didn't match real life, records show

James Seevakumaran (Handout, University of…)

April 3, 2013|By Jeff Kunerth, Orlando Sentinel

Eight months after he graduated from Pinellas County's Seminole High School in 2001, James Seevakumaran wasn't working or going to school. Angry, disrespectful and profane, the 19-year-old spent most of his time alone in his bedroom, watching TV, refusing to join his younger sister, mother and stepfather for dinner or help around the house.

His bathroom was filthy, his bedroom a smelly mess. Beneath his bed was a long, black case that contained a shotgun.

On Feb. 2, 2002, while his mother was out of town, Seevakumaran was alone when his 17-year-old sister, Natasha, brought her boyfriend over to the house. Seevakumaran ordered them to leave, cursing at them and warning: "You better hurry up and get out before I have to do something stupid."

As he pulled the black case from beneath his bed, his sister slammed the door in his face. Leaving the house, she heard Seevakumaran call out: "You had better hurry up 'cause it doesn't take long to load this thing up."

The incident, detailed in a domestic-violence complaint Glennis Seevakumaran filed against her son on her daughter's behalf, resonates like an echo a decade later. Thirty-year-old James Oliver Seevakumaran, apparently unemployed and no longer enrolled at the University of Central Florida, had isolated himself from his three roommates inside his room on the third floor of the Tower 1 apartments on campus.

The shotgun was replaced by a .22-caliber tactical assault rifle. Instead of the two daggers his mother found in his bedroom, campus police found four handmade bombs, 1,000 bullets and a handgun.

But before Seevakumaran could carry out what police think were plans for a campus massacre, a terrified roommate called 911, and the police were on the way. Alone in his room, amid the flashing lights and pulsating noise of the fire alarm he activated earlier, James Seevakumaran put the .45-caliber handgun to his head and killed himself.

His high-profile suicide marked the end of a life that, until that moment, was lived with purposeful anonymity. To his high-school classmates, who went back to their Warrior yearbooks in search of "Jamie," there is nothing to see. In his four years at Seminole High, there is not one photo of Seevakumaran. That doesn't happen by accident, said yearbook adviser Carol Parzik.

"It's a conscious choice that you don't want your picture taken," said Parzik, who served as yearbook adviser for Seminole High until her retirement in 2006. "Some people just choose anonymity."

The real James?

There seems to have been two James Seevakumarans: the flesh-and-blood James and the online James. The real-life James is the one described by his roommates as solitary and socially awkward, who refused to make eye contract and spent so much time alone in his room they questioned whether he ever went to class.

The online James is someone completely different: witty, outgoing, personable and flirtatious.

"He was a funny guy. He had a lot of friends online. He was actually quite popular," said C.S. Bliss, 24, who lives in Minnesota.

Bliss said Seevakumaran had a quick, sarcastic wit and compared him to the wisecracking movie character Iron Man played by Robert Downey Jr.: "That was his personality."

Bliss said he started playing multiplayer online video games with Seevakumaran in 2003 while still in high school. For the next four years, they were online together from six to 14 hours a day playing Final Fantasy XI, a science-fiction, role-playing game.

During that time, Bliss said, he and James became close friends without ever meeting in person.

"We were both pretty anti-social and the game gave us a way to make human friends," Bliss said in an email.

As they came to know each other online, Bliss said Seevakumaran talked about going to bars with a buddy and dating girls but never spoke of having a serious girlfriend or mentioned any male friends by name. Seevakumaran never talked about his mother or that he had a sister but complained about living with his father, who moved to Altamonte Springs after his parents divorced. The father and son did not get along.

"He hated his dad," Bliss said.

Another online friend, John Saravia, said Seevakumaran asked him for advice on how to live on his own once he moved out of his father's place. Saravia, who was introduced to Seevakumaran by Bliss, said James told him he bounced from job to job, including selling cars and working at a gas station.

"He was trying to find a way to move out and how he could make it by himself," said Saravia, 26, who also lives in Minnesota and never met Seevakumaran in person.

Both Saravia and Bliss lost contact with Seevakumaran in late 2011 and don't know what might have happened to their friend between then and March 18, 2013, when he took his own life. Bliss is convinced the James Seevakumaran he knew never would have engaged in mass murder.